Norma for vs2012

Re: Norma for vs2012

To be honest with you I haven't even installed the beta yet. I'm still seeing well over twice as many VS2005 downloads as VS2010, with VS2008 a distant 3rd. However, I'm assuming with Windows8 coming out that there will a more compelling reason to jump to VS2012, so I need to at least look at it:)

-Matt

PS Hopefully, they'll fix the memory leaks. I can run VS2005 for weeks at a time, but VS2010 leaks so badly I need to restart it at least twice a day. Anyone from MS reading this thread? Feature request number 1: the IDE process should not bloat to around a GB of memory when you run it for more than an hour.

Re: Norma for vs2012

Has any thought been given to becoming an extension to Sparx Enterprise Architect? EA 9 provides a much richer actor, event, and process model which could be leveraged within an ORM model, extending the already extensive database reverse and forward engineering capabilities of the tool. There's also a very robust extension architecture and object model with which to interact.

With KPMG, Wells Fargo, and many others standardizing on Sparx EA, it would be great to move the database engineering forward in the process to a fully featured architecture and CASE tool.

Re: Norma for vs2012

Re: Norma for vs2012

I can now say there is a good chance you'll see it soon. I first had to fix the build system to work on 64-bit boxes. This may seem like an odd prerequisite, but I don't really have space on my 32-bit native box for yet another version of visual studio, so I had to get things working on my 64-bit Win7 machine. Visual Studio is 32-bit and runs in the Wow6432 compatibility layer, so there were some tricky things (watch out if you run scripts from inside a build process: the batch file used to launch MSBuild or Visual Studio is 64-bit, but the batch files launched by those processes are 32-bit. The Visual Studio registry keys are in different places for each bitness).

I've now installed VS2012 and the SDK, gotten the preliminary development tools to compile, and gotten the main package to compile and install. Getting VS2012 to recognize the extension was harder than VS2010 and there were a couple of other initial problems (no colorization in the fact editor, error activation isn't selecting specific items in the properties window). I haven't tried to build any other components yet (code generation, relational extensions, setup, etc). However, for a first pass it looks very promising, certainly much easier than the jump to VS2010.

I can't give you a firm date yet, but the initial indication is that I can put it in the next public release with the current feature set. I won't be able to look at Win8/touch/metro features until later in the year.

Re: Norma for vs2012

Re: Norma for vs2012

I've had this ready to go with a new drop, but had a few things to clean up before a new public drop. Unfortunately, I've let my temporary VS2012 license expire on the only machine I have it on. I can still run all of the build tools, but I can't open the IDE to verify the installation.

For performance reasons, VS2012 stopped scanning for newly installed extensions on startup, so the 2012 version is again installed as a VS package, which means that NORMA installation is closer to the slow VS2005/VS2008 speeds than you saw with VS2010, where NORMA installs as a VS extension.

Re: Norma for vs2012

I've heard of one successful VS2012 install, which is encouraging. However, 1509 had a problem populating the initial relational diagram, so I've update the preview file to http://ORMSolutions.com/NORMAPreview/NORMA_VS2012_2013-01CTP.Build1510.zip. I'm hoping this one is golden and will be the Januaray 2013 CTP very soon (yes, I gave up on a December release once January hit double digits and 1509 bombed out).

Re: Norma for vs2012

Installed this CTP on my work machine and it is working just fine with our model file in VS2012, diagrams and generated files look correct. Running on Windows 7 Enterprise with VS2010 and VS2012 installed side by side. Looking forward to the release on this, NORMA is the only reason we're still using VS2010.

Re: Norma for vs2012

I've pushed this same version now as the official January 2013 CTP release (just changed the file name), so you don't need to reinstall.

I use VS2010 as little as possible (testing NORMA and debugging web sites). It's number one feature seems to be leaking massive amounts of memory while doing nothing at all during the day. When my memory-constrained machine grinds to a halt it generally means I've left VS2010 open too long and its memory use is approaching 1GB. I can leave VS2005 and VS2008 open for days on end with no problem, and will hopefully be able to do the same with VS2012.